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<title>In Like The Rose by LocketShoruOLD (LocketShoru)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25763020">In Like The Rose</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoruOLD'>LocketShoruOLD (LocketShoru)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Saint Seiya, 聖闘士星矢: 冥王神話 | Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Friendship, Gen, Mirrorverse, Pisces Albafica's POV, Saint Seiya Week 2020, musings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 05:28:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,110</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25763020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoruOLD</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>[Day 5: Loneliness] The king is the land, which means the land gets opinions. The land seems to think Albafica is the king, and is more than happy to accommodate him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Pisces Albafica &amp; Leo Regulus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>SAINT SEIYA WEEK 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>In Like The Rose</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Today's theme was loneliness, and I slammed on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMfBbEF808">In Like The Rose</a> by the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Seemed fitting.<br/>This is Mirrorverse, technically. Alba and Regulus are on pretty good terms, with Alba being Regu's favourite babysitter. Both of them are skilled spellcasters.<br/>Fuck finals. At least I'm almost done. This one was really quick because I'm so fucking tired. I spent all day working on one final project and also sat the exam for the other. Ugh. Tomorrow will be better.</p><p>
  <i>Note: moving to LSold because I don't like this much and I can rewrite it better. Keeping up for archival reasons.</i>
</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sun went down. The guard changed shift, shuffling through as the nightwatch took over. He watched from atop the chimney of his temple, where the smoke made it impossible for anyone to see him. Dègel’s cosmos vanished over the ridge, out on border watch for the night. One by one, the cosmos of his fellow Gold Saints dimmed into slumber or meditation. One by one, they surrendered the world to him, ceding their territory for the night. Below him, he could almost feel the Pisces Temple awaken.</p><p>As each of his colleagues fell into slumbers, traveling into the Hyperdimension to the dream-plane under powers they’d never manage otherwise, the roses began to bloom. Their power rose with the slumbers of those around him, their territory expanding as the ones guarding their borders abandoned them. And soon enough, ten of twelve Gold Saints were asleep, and his garden had fully blossomed, marking the air with a pretty, poisonous scent.</p><p>He slipped off the edge of the chimney, landing deftly on the wrought-bronze fence, twirling to see the temple one last time before falling backward into a hole that hadn’t been there before, and wasn’t there again the moment he was through.</p><p>The tunnel opened up before him, roughly-hewn from the stone and mostly abandoned. But his feet touched the dusty floor and the four torches set into the wall nearest him flared to life. They glowed a bright, brilliant blue, the colour of brunnera in the light. Witchlight, enchanted to burn only when the landscape willed it.</p><p>The king is the land, so the saying went. And when the king is the land, the land gets an opinion. As far as he knew, talking to the buildings meant that he was king as far as the land was concerned. He doubted even the Pope could wrench these forgotten halls from him. He began down the tunnel in a quick stride, the torches illuminating the walls, lighting and extinguishing themselves to stay within the four or six nearest to him. Enough to light his way, but not enough to mark that he had passed through here.</p><p>He tried to be kind, when the world gave him a chance to be. So down the tunnels he went, stepping out of his way every now and then to perform the hopscotch someone had left in the dusty stone. The tunnels grew marginally warmer, and as he passed, he opened a palm and flared his cosmos, a great blue light flaming outward from his hand. This was an offering of cosmos, an offering to the mountain: it would take his cosmos and use it for its own ends. Since it often expended cosmos to aid him, it was only right to pay it back sometimes.</p><p>He had not gone very far, and yet he had still gone miles, by the time he took a corner into a side tunnel, opening up into a small room near a mouth of the cave. He was reasonably sure that the tunnels were a sort of labyrinth, perhaps invented back in the Age of Myth. The original one was in Crete. It was no reason not to have a second one. </p><p>He reached for a dark, worn travelling cloak off a stalactite jutting out of the wall near the ceiling, and wrapped it around his shoulders, withdrawing a smoke-pipe from its inner pocket. </p><p>Albafica took in a breath. Best to do this while still under the cover of the relative darkness. "Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?" he muttered, flicking his wrists in a half-complicated gesture. "Yes sir, yes sir, but you can't have any, fuck off." The spell rose around him, until he could see the barest trace of a shimmer around himself. He stepped forward and leaned over to see a pool of water beside him that had not been there before, and checked his reflection.</p><p>Short black hair in a pageboy bob, features that looked of Italian descent, clothes far below his station, an unrecognizable cloak. It seemed just right. Nobody would recognize him now, nothing except for the points of his ears, carefully covered by his hair. He offered his reflection a stoic, impassive look, before turning to the cave entrance.</p><p>"Nice illusion," said a voice behind him, young and masculine and cheerful. Albafica didn't bother to turn.</p><p>"Smart of you to notice I was wearing one," he answered, unsurprised. He'd only ever taught two people how to ask Sanctuary itself for help. Maybe that made him lonely, having figured out that the mountain and everything in and on it was semi-sentient just because he'd  been talking to it for years, but he'd learned, and it had been willing to listen to him.</p><p>"Watched you cast it. Where you going?" Leo Regulus walked up to stand beside him within eyesight, a similar glitter in the air around him and the near-spitting appearance of a man long gone from Sanctuary. The only difference was the strawberry-blond hair, where he was used to seeing auburn.</p><p>"Nowhere you would care to follow," Albafica replied. "Boys your age should be in bed, not sneaking out to interrogate their elders."</p><p>Regulus only smiled. "But what you see is what you're getting, and boys of the age you're seeing can do whatever they'd like."</p><p>Albafica rolled his eyes. Regulus would argue, and he always wanted to play. It was a pity he was going to be busy tonight. He drew the smoke-pipe from his cloak, raising it to a torch to light it with witchlight. The fire would be real, and scarlet-red, because that was what he needed, and Sanctuary was obliging. He took a sweet puff of it, and eyed his companion.</p><p>"I intend on being alone tonight, <em>piscín</em>," he said, Irish drifting off his tongue like the most natural thing of all, and the cruelest of all was simply that it was. "If you intend to ruin my plans, best get on with it while we're on neutral territory yet."</p><p>He swept past Regulus, out of the cave, into the night. The entrance didn't open out in Greece, not even on the mainland of Europe. But there was adventure in the air, and he could taste it all the sweeter past the smoke-leaf, and he intended on more than just a taste. For the world ahead of him, sleeping and unaware, that was a gift beyond measure. After all, the dark was for the lonely, and the lonely were territorial. If Regulus wanted to play cat-and-fish, he could.</p><p>It was simply a matter of catching up, before Albafica drowned the world on the hunt for adventure.</p>
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